ABSTRACT
Given Satan’s genius for inserting himself in dreams and images, it is not farfetched to wonder might he be lurking unnoticed around the sociological imagination? To a very odd extent, Satan has emerged as a foil for the bored in the modernity, a guest for those afflicted with Faustian properties of curiosity and ‘mine host’ for the soulless who would sell their souls to anybody. With its confessed blindness to the issue of evil, sociology, prideful in having vaporised God, finds itself oddly vulnerable to the charms of Satan posing as the imaginary friend of the discipline. The catch-22 facing the discipline is that the more it succeeds in its genius of analysis, the more it produces a dehumanised homo sociologicus. With the greatest of reluctance, to alleviate such difficulties and to preclude the human condition being treated as an avatar, sociology has to attend to circumstances that mark out properties of humanity. It might aspire to the good, but that property has an unsettling vulnerability to irruptions of evil.
